Monday, July 19, 2010

We’re a couple of days late to this but the sheer ingeniousness of it warrants a thread. Everyone recognizes the Old Spice Guy from the Super Bowl, right? Okay. As a marketing stunt, management decided to put him together with a camera crew, a writing team, and some social-networking nerds and solicit questions from readers on Twitter, Facebook, etc. In rat-a-tat fashion, they wrote, recorded, and uploaded their responses to YouTube as quickly as they could — and ended up with 87 of them in the course of three days. As word got around, they started getting questions from George Stephanopoulos, Demi Moore, Perez Hilton, and so forth; many of the clips received several hundred thousand views and the grand finale is already over a million. The goodwill and celebrity buzz they earned from such a fast, inexpensive display of humor and tech-savvy is off the charts. It’s a master stroke, to the point where I wonder whether any other company will have the stones to mimic them. So identified will this particular genre of ‘Net marketing now be with Old Spice that any emulation will seem like a rip-off.If you want to poke through the clips, click here and then click “Old Spice | Responses” in the right-hand sidebar. That’ll bring up a sidebar menu of the complete collection (in reverse chronological order). Here’s his series with Alyssa Milano, who got sufficiently into it that she ended up recording her own video response. Like I say, ingenious.Update: This guy’s not bad either.Update: Did I say the Super Bowl? I meant the day after the Super Bowl, of course(!).